Hello all,
I have an external WD My Book Home 500GB drive, which apparently has bad sectors. It appears in File Explorer (Win 10) and shows the capacity/used gauge correctly. However, it also causes the "This disk has errors" warning, and the computer freezes often when anything tries to access it.
I've tried several different recovery programs, with mixed results. Two worth noting:
- PhotoRec -- have to use the Command version; the GUI version doesn't see the drive. It quickly returns "Error reading sector _____" and the remaining time increases to thousands of hours.
- EaseUS DRW Pro -- scans take hours, but it finds all the directory structures, folders, and identifies all the files (mostly photos). In the program's interface, the files have correct names and filesizes, but when it performs the recovery they all have 0kb.
Which brings me to Recuva. Its scan also takes hours, but it identifies a huge amount of .CHK files. I have recovered some of these and run them through UnCHK, which converts them to .EXIF and they are intact photos.
(I have avoided running CHKDISK, but it looks like someone did at some point, or the system did it automatically perhaps.)
When I highlight the found .CHK files and try to recover them, Recuva will zoom along for a bit and then hang on a file. I've given it a couple of hours before stopping the process. It will have recovered the files up to that point. I've tried just starting with the file AFTER the one it got stuck on, but that file will freeze it too. And because the drive is bad, getting it to stop can take a half-hour or more before I can try again.
I'm guessing those files are on a bad sector... but I have no way of knowing which files are which, or how many are bad -- so trying thousands of them one by one, with 30-60 minutes of freeze-time each, is obviously not an option.
My questions:
1. Is there any way to have Recuva skip (or filter out) files that are bad, that could/will cause it to hang?
2. Or, should I just let the recovery process run? Will Recuva eventually 'give up' on bad files and move on?
Thanks for any help!
B